The cheers of Clearwater City were a hollow vibration against the sudden, suffocating silence of the cosmos. As the white-quartz remains of the palace settled into the crater where the slums once stood, the blue sky Han Feng had fought so hard to restore began to ripple. It wasn't a cloud or a storm; it was the distortion of a lens.
Han Feng stood atop the ruins, the golden wine gourd of the Mad Alchemist clutched in his hand. He looked up, not with the eyes of a mortal, but through the Purification Mirror. The starlight blue of his pupils reflected a horror that surpassed the Emerald Emperor.
In the void beyond the atmosphere, a lidless, gargantuan eye—made of coalesced shadows and dying suns—had uncurled. It was the Void-Devourer, a celestial parasite that pruned the universe of "anomalies." To the Devourer, the sudden burst of 100% purity on this backwater planet was a flare in a dark forest.
"It saw us," Su Yue whispered, her knees hitting the white stone. The strength of a Stage 2 cultivator was nothing before the gaze of a Tier 13 Astral Entity. "Han Feng... the sky is bleeding."
Black, oily tears began to fall from the heavens—concentrated drops of Primordial Void that erased the air as they fell. Each drop that hit the city below caused a silent explosion of non-existence.
A few yards away, the broken Emerald Emperor let out a wheezing, hysterical laugh. His skin was sloughing off in grey flakes, his "divinity" a memory.
"You fool..." the Emperor rasped, pointing a skeletal finger at the eye in the sky. "I was a cage! I kept this world putrid, smelling of rot and death, so That would find us unappetizing. You've cleaned the meat, Sanitizer. Now the predator is going to eat."
Han Feng didn't look at him. He felt the Star-Silk on his blade vibrating at a frequency so high it began to sing. The Mirror on his chest was glowing with a frantic, white heat.
"I didn't clean the world to feed a monster," Han Feng said, his voice cold. "I cleaned it to give us the strength to fight back."
"Fight back?" The Emperor's eyes rolled back. "That thing swallows entire star systems! We are microbes!"
"Then we will be the microbes that make it sick," Han Feng replied.
Han Feng opened the stopper of the Mad Alchemist's Gourd. He expected wine, but what poured out was a stream of Liquified Spirit-Veins—the lifeblood of the planet that Old Man Gu had spent three centuries secretly gathering.
"Lin Xiruo, Su Yue, get to the center of the Palace Array!" Han Feng commanded.
As the black tears of the Devourer began to dissolve the palace's outer walls, Han Feng poured the liquid into the Star-Silk wrapped around the Azure Phoenix Wing.
[System Warning: Energy Input Exceeds Current Capacity.]
[Mirror Evolution Triggered: Phase 3 — The Astral Filter.]
"We aren't staying here," Han Feng said, his robes beginning to disintegrate from the sheer pressure of the energy. "The Lower Realm is compromised. If we stay, the Devourer will stay until this planet is a husk. We have to draw it away."
"How?" Lin Xiruo asked, her sword-intent creating a small dome of protection against the falling void-tears.
"We go to the Middle Realm," Han Feng said, looking at the golden gourd. "Gu didn't just leave me energy. He left me the coordinates for the Great Void-Gate."
The Void-Devourer began to descend. Its "pupil," a swirling vortex of anti-matter, focused entirely on the palace. A beam of absolute darkness shot downward, intending to delete the Sanctuary of the Pure Path once and for all.
"Hold on to me!" Han Feng roared.
He thrust the Azure Phoenix Wing upward. The Star-Silk unraveled, spinning into a massive, iridescent cocoon that enveloped Han Feng, Lin Xiruo, Su Yue, and even the unconscious Yan.
"Mirror Art: Dimensional Bleach!"
Han Feng didn't try to block the Devourer's beam. He used the Mirror to purify the distance between the Lower Realm and the Middle Realm. He turned the space in front of them into a "Clean Path" that ignored the laws of physics.
The black beam hit the palace.
SILENCE.
The entire mountain top, the white palace, and the four people upon it vanished. They didn't explode; they were simply gone, leaving behind a perfect, circular hole in the planet's crust.
The Void-Devourer blinked. Its prey had vanished into the "Middle Fold"—a higher dimension of existence where the Taint was even more complex, and the light was even harder to find.
Han Feng's consciousness shattered and reformed a thousand times in the span of a heartbeat.
When he finally opened his eyes, he wasn't on a mountain. He was standing on a shore of grey, powdery ash. Above him, three moons of different colors—crimson, cobalt, and emerald—hung in a sky of deep violet.
The air here didn't just smell of rot; it smelled of Ancient War.
[Location Identified: The Middle Realm — The Desolation of the Ten Empires.]
[Status: Mirror Damaged (60%). User Foundation: Stage 4 (Unstable).]
Beside him, Lin Xiruo and Su Yue lay unconscious. The Azure Phoenix Wing was dull, its Star-Silk burnt to a crisp. The golden gourd was empty.
Han Feng tried to stand, but his legs failed. He looked at his hands—they were covered in fine, silver cracks, the price of transporting them across dimensions.
From the dunes of ash, a group of figures approached. They weren't wearing the leather and jade of the Lower Realm. They wore heavy, mechanized suits of Aether-Brass, their faces hidden behind multi-lensed gas masks. They carried rifles that hummed with the power of Core-Refined Stones.
"Look at this," one of the figures said, his voice filtered through a metallic vox-grille. "A Pure-Seed, just fallen from the sky. And he's carrying a Pre-Fall gourd."
"Kill the girls, take the boy to the Auction House of the Damned," another voice ordered. "The Elders of the Ash-Wastes will pay a fortune for a 'Sanitizer' slave."
Han Feng reached for his sword, but his fingers couldn't even twitch.
As the mechanized hunters close in, one of them raises a glowing branding iron toward Han Feng's chest—right toward the Purification Mirror.
"Wait," the leader of the hunters whispered, his lenses zooming in on the Mirror. "That's not a relic. That's the Heart of the First War. If the Sovereign of Ash finds out we have this... we won't just be rich. We'll be gods."
Behind the hunters, the crimson moon began to bleed. The Middle Realm was not a sanctuary; it was a slaughterhouse. And Han Feng had just arrived as the main course.